Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 08, 2012 @03:50PM
from the they-must-be-proud dept.

TheGift73 sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"With nearly 4 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV-show of the season. Worldwide hype combined with restricted availability are the key ingredients for the staggering number of unauthorized downloads. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory complete the top three, albeit with significantly fewer downloads than the chart topper. ... While there are many reasons for people to download TV-shows through BitTorrent, airing delays and HBO's choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons."

The only way to push back is to repeal the obscene legislation that brands copyright infringers as criminals

No, you simply walk away from content creators whose practices you dislike. The people who make Game Of Thrones weren't forced to go work with HBO. It's a choice. You don't like HBO's approach to running a viable, non-bankrupt production and distribution company, which means you don't like the creative people who - with endless choices before them - choose specifically to work with HBO and within their boundaries. Why would you want to consume the creative work of people who make what you consider to be ob

Part of the reason that cable companies are willing to pay a premium price for HBO is because they are paying in part for a window of exclusivity, because access to HBO is an incentive for customers to sign up for cable. If the value of HBO to Comcast is decreased, because HBO is now available in other ways at lower cost, so that HBO is no longer an incentive to have a cable account, then obviously the amount that Comcast will be willing to pay for HBO will be lower. That's basic economics. So HBO would have to be convinced that the amount of money they would make by offering their shows separately will be greater than what they will lose by having to cut their price to make their service attractive to the cable companies. But offering HBO separately from cable adds additional costs for HBO. Instead of Comcast recruiting the customers and handling the billing, HBO will have to do this, which will drive up HBO's costs and further increase the price they will have to charge for separate HBO shows. HBO has likely done the math and concluded that they will end up losing money.

I'm going to be generous and guess that that means about the same number of people would be interested in watching it, but don't want to pirate AND don't have HBO, so it's possible that HBO is only getting about a third of the eyeballs it could.

I think what the GP meant was obscene stupidity. If you can sell a thousand copies for $100 each, or a million copies for $10 each, and choose the former, the only thing to do is take your executives out to the barn with a shotgun. Or at the very least, not complain when people copy your shit.

The issue with HBO is that they are not an independent company. With their programming, they are one of the few companies that could make a killing by distributing online, as we all know. However, they are a division of Time Warner. The rest of their channels just don't have the pull HBO has. What would happen to them if they started selling HBO without a cable contract?

Large conglomerates lead to decisions like this: good for the conglomerate, bad for some divisions, and most customers.

So you are saying everyone is entitled to cheap entertainment, cheap being whatever you dictate.

It's got nothing to do with entitlement. It's just what's going to happen. Restrict a market, a black market develops. You can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you want to solve it, you need to address the root cause of why that market developed. Trying to legislate it away is futile, as it just further restricts the market, and enhances the value of the black market further.

I don't think there is a good excuse for unlicensed viewing of recorded entertainment other than "because we can."

And I don't think there is a good excuse for 100+ years of copyrighting entertainment otgo unheard.her than "because we can". Unfortunately, since I don't "donate" millions to politicians, my thoughts don't appear to count.

I've thought about this for quite a bit and I think a better word to throw around is 'opportunity'. For both parties. People have the 'opportunity' to download something they desire for free and somewhat easily vs. paying a lot of money and jumping through hoops. If DRM/no infringment was perfect, I think HBO would still only see a minor uptick in subscribers.

On the other side- it is a missed 'opportunity' to make more money off of something

>>>If you wave an estimated $90 per month (which may very by market), you can get HBO Go.

P.S. I just donated $90 to Clarkesworld magazine. Why? Because they gave me not just one month, but 6 YEARS of entertainment. (Including expensive narrators reading the stories to you.) All of it archived here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/ [clarkesworldmagazine.com]

Fie on HBO, Comcast, et cetera and their ripoff ~$1100 a year cost. I'd be willing to pay a la carte service like Sirius XM has ($8 for any 40 channels of you

Next day, post it on a site with commercials in it, DVD quality.Commercial can be zip code based.Have an option for someone to pay a buck to see it without ads high quality.Make the blu-ray available immediately at the end of the seasons..Have an option to subscribe to all shows, for 20 bucks a month.Sell a devices for people who need it that's easy to use. Plug in Cat cable, plug in HDMI.

Develop a model where you will eventually be online subscriber only, forgo cable/satellite

The tech to change to the incoming model exists right now.

Where is something that will piss a bunch of you off:

It would behoove the industry immensely if there was a site for all shows under this model. Every show that ever existed.free with commercials, pay without.Hulu was so damn close.

And make it world wide availability, in any region, DRM free, becasue it will end up getting pirated widely where it cant be bought legitimately.Pay TV: Im not going to PAY for TV aand have to watch Ads. If they want my eyeballs on an ad, the content had better be free.

You claim to be aware of a model for financing production of a television series that is better than artificial scarcity.

Better, but not perfect.

There have been plenty of large-scale, expensive productions financed successfully without requiring viewers to have a $90/month subscription. The "artificial scarcity" you're talking about is not there in order to finance Game of Thrones, rather Game of Thrones is there to bring in subscribers. Seeing it first and, I assume, in pristine quality, is worth someth

1- Lower the cost of production (this, of course, risks lowering the quality of the product)
2- Increase the revenue brought in by the show to compensate for the higher production values, which can be done by:
2a- Sell as many units of your product to as many consumers as possible at the highest price the market will bear (which is calculated from factors such as competition, demand, available supply, and elasticity of your product). This is the ideal situation. If you cannot make a profit doing this, you must resort to option 1 above or 2b below, and should probably be planning on ways to get here through better marketing, better distribution, better quality, better price, or lower elasticity (i.e. make your product one that people can't live without). If you cannot do this, you should be questioning how viable your product is.
2b- Create artificial scarcity in order to get a higher sales price at the risk of not selling to as many consumers (this almost guarantees a very high rate of piracy for digital goods). This is especially effective for ultra-high demand goods, like jewelry, which oddly enough only has value because it is scarce in the first place.

Disclaimer: It's been many years since my ECON classes; someone will surely have better or more correct ways to put this.

Businesses have been using option 2b for years and years, and it works terrifically, until people find a way to do an end-run around your artificial scarcity techniques. It's never been easier to do this than now, with the advent of the digital age. While I don't have the answer to your question, it's obvious that protecting the ability to create artificial scarcity for digital goods simply isn't long-term viable option.

I guess this is why we are seeing a new wave of "constantly phoning home" software; it's really the last line of defense for digital scarcity. I have no doubt that it's a stop-gap solution, too; I don't think consumers will stand for this behavior over the long run. Can you imagine what things will be like when every piece of software you use needs to constantly fire off packets to stay running? Not just Diablo 3, but Office, Photoshop, or what the hell, Windows?

I always find it interesting how corporations rail against the morality of piracy, which is questionably effective as a deterrent, and try to use that to justify everything from stronger copyright laws to DRM. I think they use moral dogma to train honest consumers that increasingly draconian protection is a necessary pain in the ass due to the evil pirates, rather than to actually prevent people from pirating their product. They HAVE to realize that since digital piracy isn't going away, the right or wrong of it is irrelevant, from a practical standpoint. Once honest consumers realize this, too, and how much easier AND cheaper it is to just pirate crap they want, they'll become significantly less honest. Can these corps really not see the end result of this cycle? I envision one last very rich fellow as the sole customer for all software, paying millions of dollars for each title, with the rest of the world downloading his provided software cracks, lighting his PayPal account up each time.

Not true. Blu-ray sales of the show are at record levels. The market is apparently willing to pay plenty. There is just no way for studios to reconcile the idea that all those people who were exposed to the show via torrents turned around and bought copies afterward.

Since it is completely inconsistent with the argument they make and will continue to make about piracy costing them revenue they will naturally do the right thing and give the profits they've made due to free viral exposure due to piracy back.

Crap. This is a classic argument that falls down. Let me spell it out for you.

Your argument: The customer can:

1. Pay $x and get the product.

2. Pay $0 and get the product illegally.

The reality: The customer can:

1. Pay $x and get the product, in a medium they don't want, with adverts, in some areas a long time after it's come out, etc...

2. Pay $0 and get the product easily and instantly, illegally.

Yes. There are some people who will pirate something regardless of what you do. The reality is that most people, given the opportunity to get something good in a form they want for a reasonable price will jump on it (Steam, Good old Games, Louis C.K., etc... have proved this). Most of those that do end up pirating are kids who probably couldn't afford it anyway (who later become paying fans), or people who wouldn't pay for it whatever. I'm not saying there are not sales lost to piracy, but there are far, far more lost to giving us content in a rubbish way for too much. Inconvinience us and of course we'll take it for free without the inconvinience. Not only that, but you are giving people a way to justify it to themselves morally.

It's not a right, it's a simple business practice called Price elasticity of Demand [wikipedia.org].In a nutshell, the lower the price of something the more demand there will be. It's not necessarily a linear graph (i.e. 10 people will pay $100 but 100 people will pay $10) and it varies depending on the product, what time of year it is, the market in general etc. but the principal is always the same.

In this case, all people want is the ability to pay for just the standalone service that they want rather than having to buy bundles of crap they don't need.I'm not even from the US, I can't get "HBO" and I support this philosophy - I have 165 TV channels due to my provider's "packages" and I find myself switching between about the same 10 or 15 in the average week, some of which are free to air anyway.

To make matters worse, with my current provider there is absolutely no way I can watch Game of Thrones, no matter how much money I throw at them - they don't have the channel that shows it, only one provider does and its exclusive to them and only them (for those wonder, I live in the UK, use Virgin Media for their broadband and Sky Atlantic is the Channel that shows Game of Thrones, which Sky refuses to share with Virgin).

To use an analogy, you want to buy a music track. That music track is part of an album of 12 other songs, most of which are terrible and 1 or 2 are maybe "listenable". Not only this, but there's only one music service that sells this album and it's not compatible with your current MP3 player.You COULD buy a new mp3 player, switch to the new music service (or carry multiple devices) and spend 5x more than the one song is actually worth OR just download the MP3 of the song illegally.

Thing is, when you combine Price Elasticity with virtual goods that do not have scarcity, you end up in a situation where you almost always make more money by charging less money.

So few businesses understand this, but it is 100% the new way things work. Look at Valve, they just discovered it accidentally with the summer sale, and they've been going SALE CRAZY ever since. They realize that charging $50 for video games, especially ones that aren't gigantic blockbusters, is INSANE. Instead, if you go to (wh

The best, perfect example of this, is the Humble Indie Bundle / Royal Bundle.

They let you PAY WHAT YOU WANT, because they realize if you give them $1, that's $1 of profit, and is better than 0. Each person pays what they can afford, what they feel is an appropriate value.

What happened? Did everybody choose 0? Nope, they made millions. They're printing money.

Shit isn't rocket science, guys. Get over your damn egos and accept that this is the cost of doing business.
"You want us to sell the TV show our blood, sweat, and tears went into for $1?!?"
Yes, Yes I do. And you'll make millions, so shush.

Incidentally, many people in the uk live in residences which do not permit the installation of satellite dishes, and thus CANNOT get sky, and therefore cannot legally watch game of thrones irrespective of how much they are willing to pay.There are people in other countries in a similar boat...

You are deliberately pretending that not watching it, or buying/renting a DVD aren't options. Which they are. Your (+4 informative, really?) comment is just a classic justification rant. You want instant, and free gratification. Just admit it, and carry on with your day while enjoying that fresh and honest feeling.

How it is possible to not watch, when all social media are abuzz? All friends, colleagues are talking about it??

That's the whole point/problem of the current media model: they try to earn money by abusing part of human nature, which is to share an experience. That's also why the models are guaranteed to never last long: they are against the human nature.

Exactly, you hit the nail right on the head there...Media is marketed in such a way so as to put a lot of pressure on people to watch it, and make them feel bad if they haven't seen it while all their friends have. People who have not seen the latest shows are stigmatised as being "out of touch".

If you do this, and then don't provide a method by which people can actually buy the content, then they will have no recourse but to pirate it.

It's also now common to have friends in different countries, thanks to the internet... So the old model of releasing content significantly later in different countries becomes extremely damaging too... When participating in multinational forums on the internet, you are considered to be behind the times, from a backwater and looked down upon if you have to wait 6 months to see the shows everyone else is watching.

You complete prat. The sentence is written to imply that piracy is the only option available to watch the show. Meaning, 'not watching it' is not an optional answer to the sentence.

If you are ignoring a particular method of distributing your show to people, just because it has some superficial stigma attached to it, yours is the issue. People want the fucking thing beamed to their computers, that doesn't mean that they area against the idea of paying towards it. Look at itunes, steam, whatever!

Yes, not watching is always an option. For most TV, this is exactly the option I choose these days. Not only is it very poorly made for the most part, but the bombardment of advertisements every 10 mins is beyond irritating.However, should the people at HBO be surprised when they make a top end TV series, market the hell out of it to create great demand, then distribute it in a manner that costs far too much to be possible, let alone practical for most potential viewers, and of course impossible for a vast

No they're waving enough money. HBO just believes that if they force people to buy their entire service that's okay and fine. The reality is, internet changed everything. They only want to buy, what they want to buy. Hell in Canada, most companies require you to buy blocks of other channels. Even then, HBO Canada is usually 8 months behind the curve.

The reality is, internet changed everything. They only want to buy, what they want to buy.

This is why television's channel package business model is doomed. The average cable customer only watches about a dozen channels; the rest of their cable bill goes to subsidize the other 138 channels. Cable TV is increasingly seen as not worth the cost.

If we could get a la carte programming, cable costs would plummet... those dozen channels would total about $20/month. But so would the number of channels, most of which couldn't survive without their current subsidies. Every cable and studio executive will proclaim to be a "free market guy", except in cases like this.

Hopefully when all those excess channels fail, the good programs will concentrate in the remaining ones and the chaff will be left out to dry. It seems like networks think they only need one hit show to justify their existence for the other 23 hours of the day, but they are so, so very wrong.

What you would find, is that all the mass market shows would condense onto a small number of channels, and any niche programming would simply be cut entirely. Do you really want to see non stop reality shows on 10 channels, with nothing else available to watch?

If we could get a la carte programming, cable costs would plummet... those dozen channels would total about $20/month. But so would the number of channels, most of which couldn't survive without their current subsidies.

Good. Then maybe lame ducks like the Golf channel would finally stop spamming the feed.

Seriously, IMHO the only thing more boring than playing golf is watching other people play golf.

The long walks part? What they need are some better traps. Come on... sand traps, and water traps? For real? What about flame traps, or spinning armature traps, or dizzy traps (if your ball lands here, you need to put your forehead on your club and spin around it ten times, then take your next shot). Come on! We need a golf/Wipeout crossover!

>>>an estimated $90 per month (which may very by market), you can get HBO Go.

That's just nuts. The typical Cable channel only charges 50 cents per month (less for news channels, more for TNT/USA). Even expensive channels like ESPN are only $3/month. There's no way I'm paying 90 for HBO..... I see it frequently in my hotel and it rarely has anything I want to see (just the same movies again-and-again). If I want Thrones I will buy the DVD for considerably less money.

The typical Cable channel only charges 50 cents per month (less for news channels, more for TNT/USA). Even expensive channels like ESPN are only $3/month. There's no way I'm paying 90 for HBO

HBO is only $10 if you're already buying ESPN and the rest of the $80 expanded basic package that your cable operator makes you buy before you're allowed to buy HBO. I was referring to the price for people who have "cut the cord", that is, dropped pay TV in favor of Internet-only service.

If I want Thrones I will buy the DVD for considerably less money.

And stay a season behind, which other people who have posted comments to this story find unacceptable.

I'm pretty sure there's no HBO Go service anywhere in sight here in Norway. There's Canal+, which would work but is a month late. By then somebody is bound to have spilled some spoilers, either because they're from the US or they do like I do. Besides, if you know the series is on a big cliffhanger and you know the next episode is on TPB, well... of course it's probably possible to use a VPN service to get an US IP so maybe I could use HBO Go like some of the other services, but I'm not jumping that many ho

1. My wife and I must be at home when the show is on.2. If 1. is during the time when the kids are awake or we want to do something else, then move to 3.3. Cable company DVR must record accurately. The three models I've tried have a 10% loss rate, meaning they just can't be bothered to record 1/10th of the shows they get set up to watch. The shows that DID work would often end up with periods of dead audio or would stop short and/or start late. Sometimes everything on the HDD would become

Last night's NBA semifinal game was not shown OTA. It was shown on ESPN, another network that, like HBO, refuses to sell Internet streaming subscriptions a la carte. WatchESPN.com uses the same sort of verification of cable television subscription that HBO Go uses.

I'm a Penn State fan but rarely see any game. I've decided they should be airing their games on Free TV, and if they are not willing then I'll just boycott. I'd do the same with NBA if I were a fan. I don't need sports.

ESPN only charges $3 per home per month. It's a shame Comcast and other government-created monopolies won't let you buy JUST that channel, plus maybe $5 for line maintenance. (Now that I think about it I think you can get ESPN for only $25 through Dish... not a bad deal if you love sport

However, note that they require placement on the simplest "expanded" tier, which means that it is $3 for every subscriber, regardless of whether the subscriber even cares to watch sports. To net the same amount ala carte, they would have to charge much more.

When you get Viacom doing the same thing, the networks charging for placement, etc., the base costs add up pretty quickly.

I have an antenna and don't miss cable at all. In fact I travel a lot and see cable almost every day in the hotel..... rarely do they have anything I want to see. Syfy used to have a great block of Stargate SG1, Atlantis, Galactica back-to-back but now it's devolved into some weird reality/gameshow/carbuilding channel. The last good show, Eureka, got canceled.

The other channels are pretty dismal too. I'm glad I don't pay for cable at home and just get my TV free (supplemented by hulu and fict

I can't think of any online TV show viewers that buffer the video in any appreciable way. Downloading the show via BitTorrent is pretty much the only way to guarantee the show can be watched on a slow connection, or, in the case of HD video, viewed at all without constant underruns.

That's what happens when I hit Reply too fast...The first season is available on DVD, but as you alluded to, it's not available worldwide. The second season isn't available at all; there are still people out there with no legitimate way to watch the show, and that is where BitTorrent shines.

And to answer another guy's question: The reasons people pirate Free TV shows like Big Bang Theory are numerous. The reason I do it is (1) I forgot to set the VCR or more likely (2) I am downloading old season 1 or 2 that no longer air. I'm downloading Fringe 1 even as we speak.

HBO can wake up and come to terms with the fact they can't fully control distribution, or they can continue to lose sales. Piracy is a market pressure that keeps prices low. HBO can react to that pressure or stick their collective heads in the sand and look like buffoons. Currently, they're engaged in the latter.

Besides, I fully expect HBO to pill the plug at the end like Deadwood anyway. Why? Because apparently they were afraid they wouldn't be ably to sell en

If I were to pay $90 a month for that, I would consider it a ripoff because I could neither resell nor refund my purchase. DVDs are slightly less of a rip-off in that regard.Oh, I'm paying for a service? I pay my ISP enough as it is; I don't need another money sink.

I can sort of get why people pirate GoT (although I don't agree with it... I can understand it)... because it's my understanding that it otherwise requires a subscription that isn't necessarily practical or convenient for many people.

But the other two are on network television, and I'm not sure why a person would bother pirating that when there are almost certainly more legitimate ways to access it I'm not a fan of HIMYM, but I do like Big Bang Theory, and I've had absolutely no difficulty watching it online this season, completely legally, every single week.

Maybe this is just a Canadian thing, but CTV, the Canadian network that carries Big Bang Theory, puts a lot of their programs online one day after airing it, and people have 7 to 14 days to watch it. BBT is up every Friday.

First of all, real popular shows you read about on the net normally haven't arrived on German networks, yet. Most of the time they arrive with at least one season lag, if at all. And even if you can watch the show by then, it is normally on networks which will drown you in ads every few minutes.

And don't get me started that not even today, with the full digitization of TV, you have the option to watch foreign shows undubbed in Germany. If you ever had to suffer through the German dubs of TV shows, you would no doubt also strongly consider piracy.

Of course you can wait for the DVD/BD box to arrive, containing an English audio track, but those may again arrive late or not at all. Coincidentally, GoT has been an exception here. Also, the pricing is oftentimes on the ludicrous side, and thanks to DVD and BD DRM you cannot even just get the US release.

You forgot to mention that in networks have no problem (at least that was how it was in the Netherlands) to mess up the order of episodes, forget one now and then, and have no problem with moving the show from one time to another one, several times during a season.
I pirate GoT because I am a foreigner living in Mexico and want to hear English (dubs are teh suck) and read English subtitles (I don't want to play movies loud as I am somewhat sensitive to noise, and at the level I watch a lot is just mumbling

But the other two are on network television, and I'm not sure why a person would bother pirating that when there are almost certainly more legitimate ways to access it

Because I can add it to my RSS feed, have it automatically downloaded to a network share, and access it through my XBMC setup. I don't have to check the schedule for air times. I don't have to be free at the same time as it airs. I don't have to pop open a browser to view it. And I don't have to wade through commercials.

I don't think you can get back episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Streaming is pointless if all you can do is get the latest episode(s). I would love the show, but I'm not going to get into it years into the series.

It's a lot easier do well on a test by cheating... that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

My point is that other means probably exist for being able to watch network tv programs that don't involve necessarily sitting in front of the TV while it's on, or even necessarily having a television, and that those means are not particularly inconvenient. More importantly, they are legitimate.

My point is that other means probably exist for being able to watch network tv programs that don't involve necessarily sitting in front of the TV while it's on, or even necessarily having a television, and that those means are not particularly inconvenient. More importantly, they are legitimate.

Why does legitimacy matter, given that the definition of "legitimate" is set by utter scumbags? Aside from fear of getting caught, that is. I have a DVR with basic cable). If it misses a show for any reason (wheth

If you have to ask that question, when legitimate means do exist, then it's clear that you already have a personal agenda that is biased against corporations and media companies for whatever reason.

I don't really care that you'd rather bittorrent something than use legitimate approaches to acquire it. I asked why *normal* people would bother pirating something from network TV when legitimate means exist. If legitimacy doesn't matter to you, that's your own problem. If you can't see why it might matter

If you have to ask that question, when legitimate means do exist, then it's clear that you already have a personal agenda that is biased against corporations and media companies for whatever reason.

Not corporations in general. Media companies? Sure.

I asked why *normal* people would bother pirating something from network TV when legitimate means exist. If legitimacy doesn't matter to you, that's your own problem. If you can't see why it might matter to other people, that's also your own problem.

I just downloaded the entire second season a few days ago and began watching it. I have no interest in overpriced cable/satellite television. I'll probably pick it up on Blu-Ray next year, just like I did after pirating the first season. That's a lot better treatment than most of my pirated goods get.:P

What I want to know is what how does the pirated rate correlate to the legitimate view of the show and the revenue of the HBO. Because the amount of pirating in absolut terms less concerning if there is still healthy profiting by HBO in spite of, or because of...the pirating.

HBO has actually responded to the Take My Money HBO campaign in a way, albeit via Twitter [twitter.com].

Love the love for HBO. Keep it up. For now, @RyanLawler @TechCrunch has it right: http://itsh.bo/JLtSFE [itsh.bo] #takemymoneyHBO

The TechCrunch article in question [techcrunch.com] basically goes over the math based on the fact that the average person is willing to pay $12/month, and comes to the conclusion that it's not enough to replace the revenue they would lose, on top of the higher costs of having to directly serve up content.

The Atlantic [theatlantic.com] also has a good article up covering the revenue and business realities, and is a good companion piece to the TechCrunch article.